Hon. Laban T. Moore, of Catlettsburg, has ever been a
consistent advocate and promoter of common-school education. He was
born January 13, 1829, in Wayne county, West Virginia, and mainly
educated in the schools at Louisa, Kentucky, and Marietta, Ohio. He
studied law under Rochester Beatty, and attended Transylvania Law
College, under the instructions of Judges Robertson, Woolley, and
Marshall, afterward reading with R. Apperson; licensed to practice
in 1849. He next year married Sarah Everett, of Cabell county, West
Virginia. For his advocacy of a normal college, in 1857, he was
beaten for the Legislature. He was elected to Congress in 1859, and
served during that exciting session. He recruited the Fourteenth
Kentucky Federal regiment, of which he was colonel for a time. He
was elected to the State Senate in 1881, and has mainly
distinguished himself for his eminent and successful services in
behalf of education, in that body. He was chairman of the committee
to redraft and revise the common school law, and was most
prominently the author of the present excellent law of Kentucky, a
work of inestimable value to the future of the Commonwealth. Mr.
Moore yet pursues successfully the practice of his profession.
The History of Kentucky, 1886
©Shauna Williams |
Judge George N. Brown, of Catlettsburg, judge of the
Sixteenth judicial district, was born September 22, 1822, on the
site of Huntington, West Virginia; was educated at Marshall and
Augusta Colleges, graduating at the latter; studied law, and
admitted to the bar in 1844, locating at Pikeville, and soon
building up a fine practice; was married in 1857 to Miss Maria J.
Poage, who bore him four children. Judge Brown bears justly the
reputation of being one of the ablest and purest jurists of the
Kentucky circuits; but largely extended that reputation by the
firmness and integrity in his conduct and rulings in the celebrated
murder cases of Ellis, Neal and Craft. Only his resolute
determination to enforce the law in the face of the wild and
infuriated passions of the people, who were maddened to mob violence
by the nature of the crimes committed, and a belief in the guilt of
the accused, secured the partial administration of the legal
processes and punishment. By a like stern courage and inflexible
will, the Floyd and Magoffin county frauds on the public treasury
were discovered and arrested, a service for which the auditor, in
his report for 1883, said that Judge Brown deserved the thanks of
the State. In 1873-73, he was one of the commissioners to expend
seventy-five thousand dollars on the improvement of the Big Sandy.
The History of Kentucky, 1886
©Shauna Williams |
